by Tim Parks
But the priest insisted on making coffee.
‘I’d just screwed up the pot,’ he smiled. ‘Let’s drink it together.’ Still blinking, he added ‘Cardinal Rusconi, you said?’
‘We’re collecting paintings for a show at the Castelvecchio museum; you may have read about it in the Arena. Cardinal Rusconi has been so good as to encourage me to seek out some lesser-known works right here in the Veneto, in liaison with the Cultural Heritage people, of course.’
‘Verona or Chievo?’ the priest asked Mauro as the boy turned the pink pages, frowning.
‘There’s only one team in Verona,’ the boy replied.
‘Forza Hellas,’ the holy man concurred.
It might have been Gott mit uns, Morris thought. How was it that he had never understood the connective glue of football until his son hit puberty?
‘San Bartolomeo, you said?’
‘Martyrdom of,’ Morris clarified.
‘Flayed alive, if I rightly recall.’
‘You do indeed.’
‘But aren’t we all in the end?’ the little man sighed, waiting for the espresso pot to bubble up. ‘Aren’t we all?’
‘No, Padre,’ Morris said firmly. ‘I don’t think we are.’
If there was one thing that had always exasperated Morris in Italy, it was this habit people had of supposing themselves nailed to some especially awful personal cross. Christianity existed only to give them an inflated image of their own small trials and tribulations, when the truth was none of them had the slightest idea how tough it was for a foreigner to get so much as a bruised toe inside the door of their miserable, mafia-driven society.
The priest blinked energetically. He had a round but severely wrinkled face; the cheeks in particular appeared to have been recently pumped up, then abruptly deflated. Apparently he had a problem keeping his eyelids fully open. Perhaps an asset in his profession, Morris thought.
‘Well, not literally flayed of course. Or let’s hope not,’ he laughed, ‘But don’t you think, Dottor . . . ?’
‘Duckworth.’
‘Don’t you think, Dottor Dackvert, that these paintings of martyrdom make, er, explicit, symbolically, the sufferings many of us feel? That’s why they’re interesting.’
Morris had no time at all for this sentimental imprecision, and he wanted his son, deeply immersed in the sports news, to be aware of his position and to learn from it: ‘I’m sure being flayed alive, literally,’ he raised the volume of his voice, ‘would be suffering of a quite different order from any you or I are likely to undergo, Padre. That’s what makes the picture interesting for me. That someone inflicted, and someone else underwent, such intense and special pain over a question of faith.’
Mauro looked up from the Gazzetta and asked blandly what flayed alive meant. When the priest explained, he muttered: ‘I wish someone would do that to Galliani.’
Morris had no idea who this hated fellow might be, but was taken aback when, instead of rebuking the boy’s bloodthirsty spirit, the priest said, ‘Ha, I know exactly what you mean!’ His ensuing chuckle merged quite demonically with the gurgle of the coffee bubbling up in the pot.
As they now sugared their espressos the priest explained that the church of Santa Chiara in Ecstasy had moved ten years ago, just before his time actually, from an older building which had become unusable when spring water began to rise through the floor. The Curia still hadn’t decided what to do with the place. If the picture existed it would be there, not in the new building almost a kilometre away where there were no paintings at all.
‘It must exist,’ Morris said, ‘because it’s in the Heritage Department archives.’
The priest smiled. ‘Not everything in print corresponds to reality, Dottor Dackwert.’
‘The Gazzetta’s a scandal,’ Mauro agreed, munching a second stale biscuit. ‘I only read it to get angry.’
The old church stood on the bank of a big square millpond and, to Morris’s surprise and, for some inexplicable reason, pleasure, there was indeed spring water trickling out from under the splintery old door; it sloshed along a little rut in the gravel path and down into the pond.
The priest wrestled with a rusty padlock and let them in. Inside, the damp mustiness could not have been more powerful. In the gloom something started, scratched, scuttled, and fell silent. On the far wall a frescoed Deposition was velvety with spreading mould. Morris breathed deeply and felt a strong welling of affection. It was the kind of place where he would gladly have set up house.
‘What a stink,’ his son said. ‘I’ll wait outside.’
‘As you see,’ the priest remarked, picking his way through puddles across the floor, ‘no San Bartolomeo.’
Indeed the walls were mostly frescoed with somewhat saccharine accounts of Christ’s passion. But Morris had spied a door beyond the altar and behind it, as he soon discovered, there was a wooden staircase.
‘I’ve been told not to go up there,’ the priest warned. ‘It’s unsafe.’
Morris didn’t hesitate. The first two steps looked dangerously rotten and halfway up another was simply gone, but he picked his way past them and hurried up before the priest could stop him. At the top, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed, he realised he was in exactly the sort of under-the-roof gloom that had served for the deposition of Forbes some years ago. It had amazed Morris that nobody had found the body. As the days and weeks had passed and no one raised so much as a murmur over the old fool’s disappearance, he had felt unaccountably lucky, blessed even, exonerated it seemed by the same fate that had allowed a heavy candlestick to sprout in his hand at exactly the moment the idiot had made his threat explicit. Now, six years on, here he was gazing into another dark attic that no one had bothered to check for decades, and with a smell so overpowering it could have masked any misdemeanour.
‘It’s dark. I’d need a torch,’ he shouted down to the priest.
‘Use your mobile,’ the man shouted back.
Of course! Morris shook his head and laughed. How odd to have a priest as an accomplice! He pulled out his iPhone, pressed a key and at once the space declared itself in a steady fluorescent glow; a long low attic with sloping roof choked with cobwebs and stacked with dusty packages and forgotten liturgical paraphernalia. Was the floor safe? Morris advanced a step or two. There were squeaky, splintery sounds.
‘Are you all right?’ the priest called again. ‘I’m afraid you shouldn’t be up there, Dottor Dackwert. We’re not insured.’
Morris had seen a stack of canvases, at the far end.
‘Just taking a quick look,’ he shouted.
If he walked directly down the centre of the space, he thought, there would surely be a solid beam beneath the rotting boards. Holding the phone low in front of him, he walked swiftly down the length of the small church. Cobwebs caught at his lips and there was a dead bird, feather, bone and beak, in the deep filth to his left. A crow. How had that got in?
The paintings were wrapped in thick polythene sheets. A stack of five in massive old frames, all about four feet by three. Crouching, Morris held his phone close and brushed off the dust. Was this a boat? Yes, but comically undersized for the three big men standing up in it hauling in their nets. The miracle of the fish. Nice, but not what Morris was after. Though, cast your net on the other side, he thought, was always good advice. An invitation to bisexuality, perhaps? Smiling, Morris stood up and with some effort shifted the heavy canvas along the wall. The boards groaned. ‘Are you all right?’ came the prompt shout from below. Ignoring it, Morris crouched again and peered through a veil of polythene grey. Three men walking side by side. Two in brown robes, one in white. Our Lord? The Road to Emmaus? Damn.
Again Morris moved the painting aside, again he crouched down, rubbed away the dust with his sleeve, again he peered. A kneeling woman embracing a seated man’s naked foot. Mary? Martha’s sister? The overpriced anointing oil? What a mixed bag the Bible was!
Then at last, there it was in all its gory glory, or
glorious gore. Once again Morris held the glowing phone to a dusty grey transparency and, bingo! The victim was precariously balanced on one leg, hands thrown up in the air, apparently in danger of falling over backwards, while the expert killer leaned over him with a long knife that had already stripped the skin from one vividly red arm, leaving a gleaming anatomy lesson of biceps and triceps. San Bartolomeo, patron saint of tanners!
Morris stood, reflected, then shifted Martha, Emmaus and the fishes back into the stack. He turned 180 degrees, held the phone in front of him and followed his own footsteps through the dust back to where he had started.
‘Alas, nothing,’ he declared, shaking his head as he met the priest’s anxious blinking at the bottom of the stairs. Making a great show of carefulness he jumped over the last two rotten steps and stood up slapping the dust from his hands. ‘Just dead mice and a broken lectern,’ he elaborated with evident disappointment. For fun he added, ‘Not even a brass candlestick.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ the priest observed as they went out into the daylight. ‘Anything halfway valuable was no doubt sold to help pay for the new church.’
‘You know that’s illegal,’ Morris told the priest with sudden formality. ‘The painting is registered as part of the national cultural heritage.’ He hesitated, ‘I’m afraid I shall have to report this.’
They were at the church door. The small man turned, touched Morris’s hand and looked into his face with his own rather gentle, half-closed eyes: ‘I’d be extremely grateful if you didn’t, Dottor Dackvert,’ he said. He blinked. ‘Why stir up trouble, for myself and the parish?’
Morris sighed, perhaps too theatrically, and for a few minutes, they watched Mauro skimming stones across the pond which was clogged with weed. A rusty bicycle was just visible in a mass of green. The chubby boy, who had taken off his coat to reveal an untucked shirt and trouser bottoms hanging almost below his buttocks, made little grunts of pleasure and frustration depending on the number of times a stone skipped.
The priest was smiling and blinking indulgently. ‘Extraordinary hair your son has,’ he remarked. ‘Quite unusual.’
‘I won’t keep you any longer, then,’ Morris announced brusquely. ‘In any event, thank you, Father, for your help.’
‘So, all that for nothing,’ Mauro chirped as they climbed into the car. Already he was turning on his Game Boy.
‘Not at all,’ Morris said coolly.
‘I suppose at least you know you don’t have to come back again.’
Morris left a pause of perhaps two minutes, negotiating the road out of the village. ‘On the contrary. I’m sure we will be back.’
‘How come?’
Responding to a sudden whim, instead of heading home, Morris turned right off the main road, heading north into the hills of Lessinia.
‘Why come back,’ Mauro repeated, ‘if the picture isn’t there?’
‘It is there.’
Mauro was puzzled. ‘You said it wasn’t.’
‘It’s wrapped up in the attic, and rather more interesting than I hoped.’
‘So why didn’t you say?’
Morris didn’t reply. It seemed to him that the experience of driving was perennially that of finding someone else in your way. There was always some car or van going slower than you wanted to. This was why in general he liked to be driven by others, so that he could watch their reaction, rather than have to react himself.
Mauro sat up. ‘Come on, Papà, why?’
Miracle of miracles, Morris thought, the kid had paused his computer game. He honked, accelerated, moved out to overtake, then braked fiercely when a furgoncino appeared.
‘Papà!’
Morris shook his head. ‘I’m too old for this. Time you learned to drive,’ he told his son. ‘You can start lessons at seventeen, can’t you?’
‘I’m not interested in driving,’ Mauro said.
This was unexpected.
‘I thought all young people wanted to drive. Power, freedom, car sex.’
Mauro laughed. ‘You don’t know anything about young people, Papà.’
Morris wasn’t going to rise to that kind of bait. ‘You can hardly think of running the company without driving a car,’ he pointed out.
‘Why not? Cars will soon be obsolete for personal travel.’
Behold, the utopian football thug.
‘Why did you say the painting wasn’t there, if it was?’
Morris finally got round two Vespas travelling side by side, their four riders laden with overstuffed shopping bags.
‘If the priest doesn’t know what’s in his own church, I don’t see why I should tell him.’
‘But what happens when he finds out? He’ll know you lied to him.’
‘He won’t find out.’
‘But how—’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake!’ Morris spluttered. ‘Use your head!’
Mauro was nonplussed. For a while the two sat in uneasy silence as the car climbed out of the Val d’Illasi, beyond Tregnago. Then Morris asked more affably, ‘Do you know where we’re going now?’
It was Mauro’s turn not to reply. The boy had slouched lower down into the passenger seat, his meaty knees against the dashboard.
‘You’ve forgotten your seat belt.’
Mauro said nothing.
‘It’s illegal to travel without a belt.’
‘But OK to lie to a priest,’ his son came back. ‘What would Don Lorenzo say? Will you confess to him?’
Morris was patient. He even smiled at his son’s impertinence. The fact was he had begun to feel rather excited about going back to Montecchio di Sopra. He hit the accelerator as they climbed the winding road.
‘When’s your trial again?’ he eventually asked.
‘The 20th.’
‘We’ll see who’ll be lying then,’ Morris said.
‘Not me,’ Mauro chimed. ‘You can’t complain about match-fixing and players diving and newspapers pretending games are clean when they’re not, and then go and lie in court, can you?’
How on earth, Morris wondered, in a country like Italy, and in the most Catholic of Catholic regions to boot, the bleeding heart of the Veneto, had his son come out with such a strong vocation for truth-telling? Then he reflected ruefully that it must have been the three years at Tonbridge. From England and public school his son had brought back the one trait of polite education that was of no use at all back home, and certainly not if he was to occupy an important position in Fratelli Trevisan.
‘Know where we’re going now?’ he asked again.
‘To—tell—the—truth,’ Mauro said, ‘no.’
He had found a penknife and was scraping under a fingernail.
‘You know that painting I have in The Art Room, The Death of Jezebel.’
‘I haven’t been in there for a while.’
‘The one of the woman falling from the window.’
The boy yawned. ‘Vaguely.’
‘We’re going to the church that has the original.’
‘How interesting.’
‘Isn’t it? Actually, if you’d taken a close look at the one at home it would indeed be very interesting to me to know if you could tell original and copy apart.’
‘The original is in the church.’
‘But is it?’
‘Bound to be.’
‘But imagine you weren’t sure. Would you be able to tell by studying the paintings?’
‘God, Papà. Who cares! Is this the sort of stuff you spend your time thinking about? I thought you were a business genius or something.’
‘Because you might not be able to,’ Morris went on regardless. ‘You might even think’—he was definitely enjoying himself now—‘that the original was the one at home.’
‘I wish you’d slow down,’ Mauro said abruptly. ‘These bends are bringing my toothache back.’ After a moment he asked: ‘Is it worth anything?’
‘What?’
‘The picture. What’s it worth?’
; ‘The original or the copy?’
‘God. Whichever.’
‘Things are worth what you decide they’re worth.’
Mauro thought about this for a moment. Morris was pleased. It was probably the most sustained exchange the two had ever managed. Eventually the boy said: ‘The money is real when it’s handed over.’
‘The money is real, you’re right, but the perception of worth is not the money. Maybe the buyer thinks he paid too much. Or maybe he’s gloating that he got a cheap deal. You asked me what the painting was worth.’
‘That’s not true with football players,’ Mauro said solemnly. ‘You can only measure how much a striker’s worth by how many goals he scores, not how much they paid for him.’
‘I wasn’t talking about football players. I was talking about a painting which has been around for three hundred years.’
‘And how many assists he gives,’ Mauro mused on. ‘I think Gomez is really undervalued, for example, when you consider—’
‘Actually,’ Morris interrupted, trying to force the boy to appreciate that the visit was important for him, ‘this was the last painting that Forbes copied for me.’
He accelerated into the final hairpin before the village. Mauro pressed a hand against his cheek.
‘Remember Forbes?’
‘Sure. I used to see him at the stadium.’
‘You what!’
‘That old English guy, right, who had the summer school? For posh boys.’
Morris nodded. He was flabbergasted.
‘Yeah, he used to bring a bunch of kiddies to the Bentegodi. Disadvantaged or something. Immigrants. They had places down in the parterre where the schools go. He was a bit creepy if you ask me. And bringing them there with all the racist chanting and everything. It was odd.’
Mauro shook his head, but this seemed to disturb his teeth even more.
It occurred to Morris that the whole city of Verona might have a double life he knew nothing of: by day in the workplace, by night and on Sunday afternoons at the stadium, up to God knows what.
‘How do you mean, creepy?’ he asked.
‘He was always offering sweets and treats, you know. Like Don Lorenzo that way, actually.’
